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It was the bag that 21-year-old Jarrae Nykkole Estepp packed before she hopped on a Greyhound bus from Oklahoma to California last month. The one that police recovered from a motel room on Beach Boulevard after her naked body was discovered March 14 on a conveyor belt at a recycling plant in Anaheim.

The discovery helped Anaheim police develop leads that they say linked two registered sex offenders to the killing of Estepp and three other women: Kianna Jackson, 20, of Las Vegas; Josephine Vargas, 34, of Santa Ana; and Martha Anaya, 28, of Santa Ana, all of them sex workers. The latter three had been missing since the fall.

“No parents should have to pick these things up,” Jodi Estepp said after she collected her daughter's few belongings. “I feel that I wish I was picking her up from jail one more time, anything (other) than picking her stuff up.”

A worker at Republic Services spotted the body partially covered by debris on the belt used to separate recyclables from trash and yard waste. A day later, police identified her as Jarrae Estepp, a Modesto-born woman who had previously faced prostitution charges in Oklahoma City.

Prosecutors have charged Steven Dean Gordon, 45, and Franc Cano, 27, both transients and convicted sex offenders, with four counts of special circumstances murder and four counts of rape.

Authorities say there is another victim in Orange County but have not yet identified her.

If convicted, the men face a minimum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole and are eligible for the death penalty.

EXOTIC DANCER

Jarrae Estepp's parents moved to Oklahoma when she was about 5 years old. Her father and her sister died in a car wreck when she was about 10. Her mother worked to raise the remaining four children alone, as a bartender, cook and waitress.

Jarrae Estepp didn't graduate from high school. She rebelled in her teenage years, moved in and out of her home and got into prostitution, her mother said.

She had a child out of wedlock in 2012, when she was 19, and began living with her boyfriend – the baby's father – in Oklahoma City.

Jodi Estepp said her daughter wanted to be a nurse at one time. She stopped street walking and became a stripper, and “that's where her passion lied and that's what she enjoyed,” Jodi Estepp said.

She also worked as a car hop at Sonic, and as a housekeeper at Comfort Inn to make ends meet, her mother said. “I was perfectly fine with the exotic dancing and watched her dance. She loved the attention. She was very good at it … and I was proud of her. It was better than the prostitution that she was trying to get out of,” Jodi Estepp said.

PUT UP A FIGHT

Jarrae Estepp was going to Fresno to see her brother, Jodi Estepp said. She stopped in San Bernardino for a layover of a couple of days, and must have come to Orange County because she had been here before, her mother said.

A woman Jodi Estepp talked with at the motel where Jarrae stayed told her she had seen Jarrae walk to a nearby soup kitchen. “I am thinking that that's maybe where she was headed and they took her,” Jodi Estepp said.

Jodi Estepp said she is sure that her daughter – 5 feet 4, 135 pounds – put up a fight. “She'd have to be forced,” Estepp said. “I don't know how their paths crossed. It would have took both of them (to subdue her).”

Jarrae would have put up a violent struggle against her attackers, her mother said. “She would have fought to the end,” Estepp said.

The night before she was killed, Jodi Estepp talked with her daughter.

“When your daughter is taken and murdered like this and you have that one person that can bring you peace, justice,” she said, her lips quivering, “It's like your whole world depends on that one person, and she's been it.”

Estepp collected her daughter's belongings and said she felt like this was probably the last she would hear from Trapp.

But “she was reassuring me that it was not done between (my) and her relationship,” Estepp said.

“Jarrae is her angel and she's mine,” she said. She hopes to collect her daughter's remains Monday and take them to Oklahoma to be buried with Jarrae's dad.

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